This passage describes how the mining boom in Australia has
distorted the education system:

The disparity in salaries creates distorting incentives
in career preferences as workers are drawn to the resources
sector. Throughout the 2000s, there was a chronic
shortage of teachers in Western Australia that was only resolved
after the 2008-9 financial crisis slowed the rate of resignations
and after the government shipped in foreign graduates. But other
sectors kept losing bodies. Western Australian manufacturers lost
17,300 jobs in two and half years ending in August 2010, while
the mining industry added 16,900. Perth's five universities are
full, but largely with Asian students who will take their
acquired knowledge home with them. Meanwhile, local students are
drawn to fields tied to the resources boom—mining engineering,
geology, surveying—while other programs of study, including
medicine and science, are less popular. At some point, there will
be a glut of geologists in the city. Perth is getting
richer in aggregate, but it might also be getting
dumber.

This phenomenon is known as the resource curse and has been seen
also in oil nations and banana republics.